It Takes an Ocean Not to Break
by alanabloom
Summary: "You know you're gonna hate yourself for this, don't you?" Alex close his eyes thinks of how he was packed and ready to get on that plane. Thinks of Arizona yelling at him, taking his place. He thinks of all the people over the past few months that have told him how lucky he is. So he looks up at Callie, and says, "You think I don't already?" Post-crash. Two shot.


_A/N: This is planned to just be a two-shot story, and me dealing with my massive amount of FEELS. I may write a Callie/Arizona one, too, but for now I've been okay just reading other people's for them. But I needed some Alex, because I've always adored his friendship with Arizona, and I can't wait to see how they're going to deal with the whole "guy who should've been on the plane" guilt. UGH. Title and lyrics come from The National. _

It Takes An Ocean Not to Break

_It takes awhile  
To settle down  
My shivered bones  
Wait til the panics out_

_It takes an ocean not to break_

"Is it true?"

For the first time in an hour, Callie's eyes move away from her wife's unconscious form. She blinks wearily at the figure standing in the doorway, her brain sluggish and unfocused. It takes a second for her to register Alex Karev, wild eyed and dazed as he stares down at Arizona.

He swallows hard. He shifts his weight. Swallows again. Then, he clarifies hoarsely, "Her leg. Is it true they had to…"

Callie closes her eyes, and maybe a few more tears spill over but it's become impossible to tell. "I…I should never have promised her." Her voice is hollow and unrecognizable to her own ears, as if the events of the past few hours have already changed her irreversibly. "There wasn't a choice, Arizona would've…"

Her voice breaks around the name, and Callie falls silent, sobs rounding in her throat. So Alex grabs the chart hanging at the foot of Arizona's bed.

Silence falls as he reads, and Callie shifts her grip on Arizona's limp hand, dropping her forehead against the top of their fingers.

The crash of metal slices abruptly through the quiet, and Callie jerks upright, startled. In mere seconds, she'd forgotten about Alex's presence, her world narrowing to a sort of tunnel vision where only Arizona exists. But now Arizona's chart lies across the room on the floor, and her protégé is standing there, his jaw muscles working furiously.

"Alex…"

"Mark's awake," he cuts her off abruptly. "You can…you can go see him if you want. I'll sit with her."

Callie hesitates. She'd had no intention of leaving Arizona's side, period. After nearly a week of imagining worst case scenarios as hope of finding them alive slowly drained away, Callie didn't want to let her wife out of her sight. Not to mention the fact that, terrified as she was to tell Arizona what they'd had to do, she was more afraid that Arizona might wake up alone and discover the loss herself.

"She…she won't wake up for a few hours anyway," Alex adds, and there's a pleading note to his voice that gets to Callie.

He isn't just offering to be nice, to help her out. _He_ is the one who needs this. There's a strange desperation in his eyes that's almost unrecognizable for Alex Karev, so Callie forces herself to slide her fingers from Arizona's and stand up.

"Okay," she says, more conciliatory than grateful. "But I won't be long."

He's still nodding after she leaves the room, dazed and mechanical. Alex's fingers curl spasmodically into fists at his side, and he draws several slow, deep breaths before sitting in the chair Callie vacated.

His hands are shaking, and he reaches out to clutch the sheets of the hospital bed to stop them. Belatedly, though, he realizes he's holding the space where Arizona's left leg should be; instead, it's just blanket again the flat, hard mattress, and unexpectedly his insides constrict unpleasantly.

"This is a pretty lame way to keep me from going to Hopkins, Robbins," he says gruffly. As soon as the words are out, though, it's like the room fills with echoes of their last conversation.

_You are a miserable, miserable bastard! _

_You're actually __going__?_

_No, you are NOT going to Boise, because you no longer represent this hospital._

A strangled, involuntary sound pulls itself from his throat, and Alex shakes his head hard, his throat constricting in what he tells himself is anger. "What the hell's wrong with you, huh? Why'd you have to kick me off that plane. It's crap, Robbins, it's total crap." His voice is tight and his eyes are burning. "If you'd have just let me go, you wouldn't be the laying here. If you hadn't got so pissed off, then _I'd_ be the one with a stump for a leg, and who the hell would care? I don't have a kid to carry around, and I don't roll around on freakin' roller skates all the time. And Hopkins wouldn't have wanted me anymore and you'd have been happy about that. It _should've_ been me, Robbins. So _what _is your problem? You know they only wanted me because you…"

The next words get jumbled in his throat, words that he's already said…words that are sitting in her voicemail, unheard and, now, unimportant. So instead he says the words he never managed to get out before, "I'm sorry." Alex's voice cracks in half, and he lifts his fists from the place where her leg should be, pressing the heels of his hands over his eyes. "I'm sorry, okay? Fuck, I'm sorry…"

His throat is too tight to say anything else, so Alex sits there for another ten minutes before Callie gets back, and he thinks about how his life has been made up of him systematically letting down all the people naïve enough to believe in him.

His brother and sister. Izzie. Then Meredith, no matter if she had forgiven him.

And now, finally, Arizona.

~(G*A)~

He doesn't get away fast enough.

"She's being discharged today," Callie tells him brusquely, apropos to nothing, and Alex freezes, caught.

He'd wanted to bolt from the nurse's station the second he'd realized it was _Callie_ who'd stopped to chart beside him. He avoids her as much as possible these days, in part because he hates the accusations that swirled in her eyes when she looks at him, the implicit disapproval, but more than that, it's just hard to take in the utter devastation, the bone deep exhaustion, that was now permanently etched in the orthopedic surgeon's features.

Seeing Callie so beaten down twists his guts with guilt, because Alex knows that if it was him instead of Arizona, no one loves him enough to look like that.

So it's hard. Almost as hard as it would be to make himself go to Arizona's room, like Callie so obviously wants.

Almost.

"That's good," he mutters, tone disinterested, eyes still on his chart, like Callie's just updating him on some patient he doesn't know.

Suddenly her hand sweeps into his line of vision and slams shut the folder he's holding.

"Hey!"

"It's gone on long enough," Callie tells him firmly. "You need to see her, and you need to do it now, because God knows how long it'll take before she'll allow people to come to the house…"

He's a little ashamed of the surge of relief that rushes through him at that pronouncement, but he just shakes his head, tone flippant. "Why should I?"

Callie bristles, a fire igniting in her eyes as she glares at him. "Don't even do that, Karev. You know why." He opens his mouth to speak, but she cuts him off, "And it has nothing to do with who should or shouldn't have been on that plane. You need to go because you _care_ about her."

Alex narrows his eyes at her. "So what? I hear she barely even talks to _you_. So why should I even bother?"

Callie winces slightly, but then brushes off the harsh tone. Anger's the first place Alex goes when he's scared.

So she just repeats, quiet and steady, "You know why."

For just a second, the defiant, unfeeling mask slips away, and Alex's face tightens into an almost childlike portrait of sorrow. "I _can't_," he forces out between gritted teeth, and then he walks away, like he always does.

But later, Alex essentially hides on one end of the lobby to watch Callie wheel Arizona out at the end of the day.

He sees them coming off the elevator, Callie pushing Arizona in a wheelchair. He's not close enough for her to see him, or for him to really see her face, and Alex wants it that way.

But he can see the left leg of Arizona's scrub pants knotted messily beneath the stump, and he can see the way every person in the lobby is ostentatiously trying not to stare.

~(G*A)~

He and Callie work together on a kid with aggressive osteosarcoma. Callie's explaining the benefits to amputating the child's leg to his terrified parents, and Alex can see her struggling.

When her voice falters for the fifth time, Alex gently interrupts and finishes the explanation.

Callie doesn't thank him, and when he touches her arm and asks if she's okay, she jerks away, not looking at him and saying roughly, "I don't know if I can…"

He knows what she means. She isn't sure if she can be the one to saw through the bone, to do what she watched some surgeon in Boise do to her wife.

Thinking about it turns his stomach a little, too, but Alex still says, "I'll do it." There's nothing he can do for Arizona anymore, and very little for Callie; this, at least, he can do. He's not an orthopedic surgeon, but there's nothing complicated about the amputation itself…the complications come later.

Callie nods once, acknowledging and accepting the offer, but she still isn't looking at him.

"Um…" Questions dance on the tip of Alex's tongue, the questions he hasn't let himself ask, starting with _How is she? _

But there are rumors, still, and he's afraid he already knows how she is.

People ask _him_ all the time. They seem to want to give Callie space, and assume he's the next best person to ask. He hates them for asking, for trying to hide their morbid, gossipy curiosity under the guise of concern, but mostly he hates them for the reminder that he _should_ know what's going on.

So he doesn't ask Callie how Arizona is. What slips out instead is, "Does she know I'm still here?"

Callie freezes, like she didn't expect him to mention Arizona even though her name's been in the air since they started this case. After a moment, she recovers, eyes flicking to him in exasperation. "I don't know."

"But…"

"When Hunt saw her, right after, he told her that you'd agreed to stick around until they could bring someone in…so I guess she does."

"She hasn't, um. Asked?"

Callie's eyes are cold as she turns to him fully for the first time since leaving the patient's room. "_No_, Karev. She hasn't asked if you're still here, or why she hasn't seen you since the crash, or anything like that. But if it helps, she doesn't really ask about much of anything lately." Her voice is low, almost a snarl, when she adds, "Any more _questions_?"

Alex is silent. He feels very small, and properly chastised.

After a few moments, Callie sighs, and her voice softens a little. "Look, Alex, I've watched you postpone leaving for Hopkins like three times now. You're not fooling anyone, alright? We both know what you're waiting for, why you can't go."

His head snaps up, and he's on the brink of protest, but she doesn't let him. "And it has nothing to do with Hunt finding a replacement. If you gave him a firm date, he'd find someone tomorrow."

Callie walks away, then. That night, she stands in the OR but doesn't look while he saws through bone.

Two days later, just to prove Callie wrong, he buys a plane ticket and gives Owen notice, making sure it's clear he's serious this time. He starts to pack, finally.

And he still doesn't go see her.

~(G*A)~

His last day at Seattle Grace Mercy West, he finds Callie crying in the closet.

And maybe it's just about Mark, who's set to die sometime after five , but Alex knows there's a new peds surgeon in the hospital, and he thinks it's unnecessarily cruel that those things are happening on the same day.

So he stays. It probably doesn't help, but it is another of the few, small things he can do, and after tonight there will be no more of those.

Alex sits there even after her sobs dwindle down to the occasional sniff or quivering intake of breath. The two of them sit in silence, and he's not even sure Callie realizes he stays until she asks in a quiet, thick voice, "Is it true you're leaving tonight?"

"Yeah. For real, this time."

"And that's really it? You're really just gonna go?"

And he's leaving anyway, so he just tells the truth. "I'm not a good person, okay? I just…I _don't want_ to see her. I can't. So I'm leaving, because I'm a selfish bastard. Alright?"

The quiet lingers for awhile, then Callie stands up, wiping her eyes and turning to face him. To Alex's surprise, there's no anger in her gaze; it's all softened sympathy and maddening understanding. "You know you're gonna hate yourself for this, don't you?"

He closes his eyes, and he thinks of how he was packed and ready to get on that plane. Thinks of Arizona yelling at him, taking his place. He thinks of all the people over the past few months that have told him how lucky he is.

So he looks up at Callie, meeting her eyes. "You think I don't already?"

~(G*A)~

But he doesn't go, in the end. Callie's look is knowing, _almost_ a smirk, when she sees him back in the hospital the next day.

Alex knows enough by now to stop kidding himself. He's staying for good, and he makes it official.

But he still doesn't go see her.

It's a few weeks later when he hears she's finally starting physical therapy. He doesn't know what convinced her, doesn't know what she's like now, and he doesn't ask.

But he finds out her PT schedule, and for a few hours every other day he's jumpy and nervous, checking over his shoulder and scanning corridors before he walks down them. He's probably the only one in the hospital _not_ trying to get a glimpse of her.

He's too embarrassed to ask Callie, knowing she's long since lost her patience with him, so he practically stalks the physical therapist to get vague non-confidentiality-breaking updates on how she's doing.

But the hospital's not _that_ big, and one day he's on his way back from CT, pushing an eleven year old patient in a wheelchair, when he comes face to face with Arizona.

Callie's behind her, holding a large gym bag in one hand and Sophia in the other. Arizona's on crutches, red faced and sweating, obviously just finished a session.

She's wearing a prosthetic, the first time Alex has seen that, and it's like his internal organs are lurch forward at once. She stops in front of him, and his eyes dart to the long, thin metal limb and then away far too quickly.

When he finally makes himself look at her, it's worse than staring at the prosthetic. Her eyes seem literally dulled, the bright blue almost darker, like twin bruises devoid of all spark.

"Hey." The word tumbles out before he can stop it, and Alex is instantly convinced it would have been better to say nothing at all.

Arizona makes a scornful, incredulous sort of sound, her eyes narrowing in a kind of anger he's never seen from her before, not even that last conversation before the plane. Then she hobbles past him, Callie only steps away, shaking her head in his direction as she passes.

"What happened to that lady's leg?" His patient asks in a stage whisper, tilting her chin up to look at Alex.

He can't find an answer, just says roughly, "It's not polite to stare," even though he has no idea if the girl was staring.

It occurs to him later that he doesn't even know why Arizona is mad at him: for being the reason she was on that plane, or for not coming to see her since then, or just because he's part of the world and, from what he's heard, she's been pretty pissed at everything in it.

Alex doesn't know if it's one, or all, of those reasons, and he thinks it's probably better that way.

**TO BE CONTINUED**


End file.
